H-E-B is bringing curbside service to its Central Market stores, starting with its Fort Worth store on Thursday.

But it's not stopping there with the combined online shopping and customer pickup service that Walmart and Kroger, at dozens of their stores, have proven is in demand among Dallas-Fort Worth shoppers.

Two Dallas Central Market stores will have the new dedicated curbside area this year. The curbside area and an expanded kitchen are under construction on the east side of the Lovers Lane Central Market and will open in the spring. A new Central Market on West Northwest Highway and Midway Road in Dallas, where the grocer is gutting a former Albertsons store, is scheduled to open in June with the pickup area included.

Plano, Austin and Houston Central Market stores are also getting the curbside areas, which H-E-B has already added to about 100 of its namesake stores in Houston and other markets in Texas. The plan is to "aggressively roll out the feature" at H-E-B stores across the state, the company said.

The move comes amid a broader grocery industry push into online ordering and curbside pickup. Last week, Amazon.com started using its Whole Foods Market stores in Dallas-Fort Worth to fill online grocery orders. On Thursday, Target and Shipt begin their membership-based delivery service to D-FW other Southwestern cities.

Stephen Butt, president of H-E-B's Dallas-based Central Market division, said food experts at each Central Market store will select the freshest products and carefully pack them.

Customers will be able to designate, for example, a ripe avocado to eat today and one more that's not so ripe for later in the week, said Austin Jourde, general manager of the Fort Worth store, on Hulen Street at Interstate 30. Employees who fill curbside orders will have received special training to shop to specifications and details and also to build relationships with customers, Jourde said.

The Central Market curbside service isn't free. The pickup fee is $4.95, plus a 3 percent personal shopping fee added to the order total. There's no minimum order. Pickups can take place between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m., seven days a week. To get shoppers to try the service, Central Market is waiving the $4.95 pickup fee for the first four orders.

Central Market is still using Shipt and Instacart to make home deliveries.

Amazon last week began using Whole Foods stores in four U.S. markets, including Dallas and Austin, to fill orders. The online giant purchased Austin-based Whole Foods last summer for $13.7 billion, and the industry has been waiting to see how it will use the stores for deliveries of online orders.

The Whole Foods in Dallas on Park Lane is one of the local stores where Amazon employees are filing orders. The orders are packed and held for delivery in a space at the front of the store. Based on the high level of activity there over the weekend, shoppers are trying the service, which started Thursday.

Target paid $550 million to buy Shipt, and Dallas-Fort Worth is one of its first markets as it expands the service nationwide. In the last couple of years, online grocery shopping has caught on with more customers. The grocery business introduced online shopping in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but the market wasn't ready for it and consumers didn't have broadband access that was fast enough to make it a smooth proposition.